That it is.
In the meantime, I’m sure Nvidia, et al are laughing all the way to the bank.
Remember the Long Island Iced Tea silliness? It just got sillier.
Stater Blockchain, like Long Island Iced Tea, changed its name to include Blockchain in December and is as far as I can tell just a holding company for the UK brokerage with no technology expertise of its own. Amusingly, Stater Global Markets itself actually boasts on its own website that it has no proprietary IT team or software.
If I have a second kid, we’re totally naming them ‘Blockchain.’ It’s unisex!
“All of these things will get a new life because of blockchain,” said Jerry Cuomo, vice president of technology for IBM Blockchain. “Our sales team loves blockchain because a customer that is buying blockchain rarely walks out of the store with just blockchain. They walk out with multiple things in their cart.”
Fucking lol
One rural Washington town has become the epicenter for coin mining in America thanks to it’s hydro-electric dam providing power that’s one third the average cost across the rest of the country. Check out the server farm in the facility they did the story from, I think I just figured out where most of the GTX 1060/70/80 cards sold in America in the past 6 months ended up. 5-7 BitCoin per day production, with plans to be at 50 per day by July. Fuck those guys.
On the other hand, even after the mini-crash, 5-7 BTC per day means $50,000-$70,000 per day before overhead, and it was closer to $100,000 before the recent correction. $1 mil every 10 days is pretty insane.
This is so absurd. We’re literally wasting tangible, physical resources to solve meaningless math equations in order to increment a number of make believe coins. Coins which have no value, because they’re fake.
This is modern day alchemy. It’s a giant scam, there is no gold waiting for anyone.
Eh. They have value to the extent people are willing to exchange goods and services for them. Same as any other currency. The issue is there’s no particular reason to favour bitcoin over any other cryptocurrency (and many to disfavour it), other than that it is currently the most famous and most liquid. Bitcoin’s problem isn’t that it’s fake. It’s that it’s crap.
There’s not really any reason to use crypto currency at all though, rather than currency that is actually backed by a real government.
Sure there is, it’s just those reasons tend to be about obfuscating illegal dealings. Makes it much harder to pin than a wire transfer.
And bitcoin is now back below $10k.
Indeed. But apart from that I think it’s better to view Bitcoin et al. as commodities than as currencies. Because with commodities there’s generally a clear understanding of the supply and the costs to create more supply, both of which tend to remain stable, while demand can fluctuate wildly due to all kinds of factors including of course speculation and attempts to corner. Of course most commodities have a demand component that is partially based on their real-world use, but not all.
I think you can view gold much like bitcoins. The industrial value of gold is enormously less than the price of gold. Bitcoins are basically a rarefied form of gold that has no use or physical existence whatsoever but still has a more or less controlled supply.
From a price perspective, sure. But it’s still the case that crypto functions as a medium of exchange far more than most commodities. Often badly, but still. It’s not really one or the other - for certain purposes, it makes most sense to look at it as a commodity, for others, as a currency.
Yeah, it should be a lot more fungible than pork belly futures, but in practice it’s not. Because there are so few ways to “spend” bitcoins. Until ordinary groceries and ATMs and so on accept and dispense them, I think there’s some serious problems with these things as currency.
I don’t disagree! I think it’s a shitty currency and still massively overvalued. But it doesn’t make sense to think of it solely as a commodity, just as you can’t explain its price movements if you think of it solely as a currency.
I’m happy with 95% inherently valueless commodity :: 5% currency right now. It’s the inherent valuelessness combined with speculation combined with criminal manipulation that causes the wild price swings. Contrast this with gem-quality diamonds which have similar properties except that a cartel controls supply as well as sets prices. But even so, if people were convinced diamonds were no longer needed for marriage proposals the price would drop like a stone.
Sounds about right.
… And the wild price swings prevent it from becoming a useful currency. Obviously you don’t want to use something that may plummet in value as a currency, because you may end up taking a loss. But you don’t want to use something as a currency that may suddenly appreciate in value either. Then everyone wants to hoard it while its price is climbing, and it stops being a medium of exchange.
Ironically, many of Bitcoin’s biggest proponents - it’s great, the price changes all the time, it could double in value! - are actually arguing against it being useful for its intended purpose
I am not an economist, but stability and liquidity seem most important for people to adopt something as money, and Bitcoin has neither right now. Backing by central governments is nice but not necessarily required, since gold did just fine for centuries.